Athletes competing against animals
grocery list that the wife has given us or how to go pick up our kids at school.
“You try to [ say], ‘ All right, I’m gonna get a little more sleep — maybe it’s something I did last night, maybe something I drank’. You try to find a reason that it’s not my brain, that I’m not deteriorating right before my own eyes.
“It’s the most frightening feeling, but it’s also a very weakening feeling because you feel like a child. I need help.”
By speaking out, Sapp is providing plenty of his own help to the next generation now in the NFL, players who are gradually growing more aware of the risks inherent in a sport as violent as football.
League officials were until recently inclined to ignore those risks or, even worse, attempt to dispute them.
And that obfuscation was part of the reason Sapp chose to speak out, explaining his annoyance at statements made by several prominent NFL owners.
“Down the line you could see it: ‘ there’s no correlation between football, CTE [ chronic traumatic encephalopathy], suicides and all this foolish stuff ’.
“I mean, where are you getting this information from and then spewing it out as if it’s fact?”
The facts now are clear: blows to the head in football can cause concussions, those concussions can lead to brain diseases, and those brain diseases can result in deaths.
“And it’s from the banging we did as football players,” Sapp said. “We used to tackle them by the head, used to grab facemasks. All of that was something that we had to take away from the game.
“I want this game to be better when I left than when I got into it.” Head injuries, however, are far from the only issue regarding player health that has in recent seasons engulfed the NFL and that this week earned more prominence.
What should have been a story about athlete sexuality and whether the top tier of professional sport is ready for an openly gay player took an almost tragic turn to also illustrate the depth of the painkiller problem in the NFL.
Ryan O’Callaghan, a former New England Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs offensive lineman, came out as gay this week and said he kept his sexuality hidden throughout his six- year NFL career. O’Callaghan also revealed the torment he faced when injuries ended his career in 2011, left to reckon with both his sexuality and health problems that his life as a professional football player left him illequipped to face.
“I was abusing painkillers, no question,” he told Outsports.
“It helped with the pain of the injuries, and with the pain of being gay. I just didn’t worry about being gay when I took the Vicodin. I just didn’t worry.
“I started spending all my money to put myself in a position where it would be impossible, or at least extremely difficult, to back out of killing myself,” he said.
Thankfully, the sport of football did help him emerge from those dark depths, seeking and finding help from the Chiefs and team psychologist Susan Wilson.
“It takes a lot more strength to be honest with yourself than it does to lie,” O’Callaghan said.
“It took a while to build up that strength to even tell [ Wilson].
“You have to build up trust with someone. Just telling her was like a huge weight off my shoulders.” Michael Phelps is . racing a shark? Michael Phelps is racing a shark. While it sounds like an idea the swimming great came up with after a few bong hits, we owe this inter- species clash to the Discovery Channel.
“They are one of the fastest and most efficient predators on the planet: Sharks,” read the network’s press release.
“He is our greatest champion to ever get in the water: Michael Phelps. But he has one competition left to win. An event so monumental, no one has ever attempted it before.”
I’m thinking there are several salient reasons for that, but it might be worth tuning in next month to see if Phelps’ fins measure up. Or if he gets eaten. Based on these other athletev- animal battles, anything could happen. . .
The world’s fastest animal racing an NFL running back seems like a mismatch, and it was. But the real intrigue was whether Johnson would be maimed, which looked likely when the cheetah leapt over the barrier meant to separate the pair. Luckily, that was during a warm- up and Johnson wasn’t on the other side, allowing the barrier to be built taller. Much taller.
Points for originality in this 2009 contest — unlike a cheetah, who really knows the speed of an ostrich? And additional points for courage, too. Northcut, a former NFL wide receiver, won the first race, then agreed to remove the fence keeping animal from man. That was all the motivation the ostrich needed, leaving Northcut for dust in race two.
This tug- of- war contest was the moment sport peaked. On one end of the rope, a 165kg sumo wrestler. On the other, an 82kg primate. And the sumo wrestler was destroyed. Kitononami tried so hard, straining every sinew, while the orangutan barely looked interested, at times holding the rope in one hand before pulling the poor human into a pool of muddy water.